Note: ReGNL: Rapid Prediction of GDP during Disruptive Events using Nightlights

Abstract

Policymakers often make decisions based on GDP, unemployment rate, industrial output, etc. The primary methods to obtain or estimate such information are resource-intensive. In order to make timely and well-informed decisions, it is imperative to come up with proxies for these parameters, which can be sampled quickly and efficiently, especially during disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore the use of remotely sensed data for this task. The data has become cheaper to collect than surveys and can be available in real-time. In this work, we present Regional GDP-NightLight (ReGNL), a neural network trained to predict GDP given the nightlights data and geographical coordinates. Taking the case of 50 US states, we find that ReGNL is disruption-agnostic and can predict the GDP for both normal years (2019) and years with a disruptive event (2020). ReGNL outperforms time-series ARIMA methods for prediction, even during the pandemic.